January 14, 2013

On Being the Visiting Scholar at IAALS

After 10 years
of full-time teaching at the DU Law School, I am on sabbatical leave (my first) until July.
I have been preparing for this leave for a year, since I learned that my leave
application was accepted last January. I
am honored and privileged to have the time away from my teaching
responsibilities (although I miss my students) and I want to use the time well.

While it might
be tempting to fly off to Australia for a few months, I have family
responsibilities, and I very much want to be productive with this precious
time. As I was planning for the
sabbatical, I knew that I needed to get away from my office at the law school so that I might have some distance, both for clarity and perspective. My hope was to be away, but not too far away,
so I could use the time effectively.

IAALS is lead
by Rebecca Love Kourlis, former Colorado Supreme Court Justice and last year’s
winner of the ABA’s John Marshall award.
Justice Kourlis is an incredibly impressive leader and thinker, and I am
privileged to work with her and with the extraordinary team she has assembled. IAALS is doing great work through four
initiatives: Rule One, Honoring Families, Quality Judges, and Educating
Tomorrow’s Lawyers (ETL). Readers of
this blog know that I have been involved with the ETL initiative since its
inception, and spoke at its first conference last fall. I am also conducting research on eDiscovery
issues, which is part of the Rule One initiative, and spoke at IAALS’
eDiscovery Boot Camp for State Court judges last summer. So two of my research interests dovetail with
two of the initiatives at IAALS.

It is also my
hope that by being the first Visiting Scholar here I will be able to “define
the role” for future visiting scholars from other schools. As we both explore what this role can be –
for the visitor and for IAALS – I hope we will establish this residency as
something available to other professors who might be on sabbatical in the
future, and who have research interests that connect with the work of IAALS.

I will be working
on several projects over the next several months. I am finishing the Skills & Values:
Lawyering Process book. This is a textbook
in the S&V Series for the first-year LP course that I teach, and as with
the other S&V books, is a hybrid, with some material printed and the rest available
online. I hope also to work on a short
article about using data from your writing program to create a culture of
constant improvement, and a longer article about the “Teaching” of Professional
Identity (which was developed from ideas that started as blog posts here). I am also researching the limits of proportionality in electronic Discovery law. And I hope to start a new book, in some ways
a follow-on from Law School 2.0,
which will attempt to define a “way forward” for legal education over the next
5-10 years.

I also will be attending or participating in seven conferences this year, including the Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference in late March. I am on the conference committee for that conference, and I will also be speaking on the subject of "Escaping Flatland," about the future of print law-review published scholarship in an increasingly digital world. Also, I plan to participate in the ALWD Conference in Milwaukee in June, and the Fourth Applied Legal Storytelling Conference in London in July.

I am very
grateful to my new hosts at IAALS, and for their loaning me an office where I
may work on these projects. They are
wonderful people, and I am pleased to be among friends and valued colleagues. I am also grateful to my law faculty colleague Professor Robert Anderson, who has taken on the role of Interim Director of the LP
Program while I am away. The
administrative burden of directing the program is substantial, and I appreciate
Robert’s willingness to take it on so that I might have a rest from those labors. I
know the program is in good hands in my absence, and that Robert – and my
esteemed colleagues in the LP Program – will do great work while I am away.